“I guess so, but I can’t really, that is, well, let me see what I can do,” Harriet stammered.

The assistant was frowning mightily, but she took the phone from me and had a terse conversation with my client. At the end of it, she gave me back my phone. “I’ll talk to Mr. Hendricks about it.”

She clicked over to the reception desk in her high heels and picked up the phone. I followed her over.

“She says she’s his sister … No, I don’t … all right, I’ll tell her.” She hung up and turned to me. “Mr. Hendricks wants some proof that we were really talking to Harriet Whitby”

By now we had drawn a small crowd-the guard and two people who had been on their way out of the building joined us at the reception counter. They weren’t saying anything, but secret smiles and nudges showed Hendricks’s assistant that she was putting on a good performance.

I leaned against the countertop, my eyes hot. “Are you seriously suggesting that this grieving woman leave her mother’s side to produce a photo ID for you? Is there some scandal about Marcus Whitby that you’re trying to hide? Did the magazine send him out to New Solway to die?”

The assistant’s plucked eyebrows rose in great semicircles. “Of course not. We’re only trying to protect our own privacy”

“Then take me up to Simon Hendricks now. If he knows anything about Marcus Whitby’s death, the sooner he tells me the sooner I can help the Whitby family take their dead son back home for the funeral.”

“That’s right, Delaney,” one of the onlookers said. “Stop horsing around and take the woman up to Simon.”

Several others in the group echoed the sentiment. Delaney hesitated, but realized the group’s mood had shifted against her. She stalked to the elevator, telling me over her shoulder to come with her. I followed her to the editorial offices on the sixth floor.

CHAPTER 10

Trackless Desert

Hendricks himself was as bleak in person as he’d seemed on television Monday night. He didn’t smile when his assistant introduced me, didn’t change expression when I explained why Harriet Whitby had hired me, didn’t as much as blink when I mentioned her concern that DuPage hadn’t done a proper postmortem.

“I see, Ms.”- he glanced at my card-“Warshawski. So the family believes you can tell them something the police can’t? They have actually hired you to conduct this investigation?” He sounded as though it was about as likely as my being asked to pinch-hit for Sammy Sosa.

“Your guard dog here spoke with Harriet Whitby,” I said. “And the family believes it, yes, or they wouldn’t have asked me to do the job.”

He and Delaney both stiffened at the “guard dog” title, but Hendricks merely said coldly, “And what do you expect to learn from Mr. Whitby’s current assignments?”

I again went through my song and dance about trying to understand what had taken Whitby to New Solway.